Potential government policies for promoting CCS

By mid-2010, being discussed by the British government (a strong coalition of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties),2 potential government policies for promoting CCS can be seen:

• Emissions trading scheme (ETS) permits: Much like Carbon trade, polluters without CCS technology will have to buy certificates from power plants with CCS technology
• Emission performance standard: Analogous to the Renewables obligation, the proposed EPS forces power stations to produce no more than a certain amount of carbon. The political parties of the UK say that the emissions performance standard will prevent new coal-fired power stations from being built unless they use sufficient carbon capture and storage. But they don’t tell us what the standard will be, so at the moment we don’t know what proportion of their CO2 power stations will have to capture.